Black coffee and tea made with tepid water are to be met everywhere; buffalo milk is preferred by the peasants, when they use any, to cow’s milk, which is considered thin. Sheep’s milk cheese is to be met with in almost every cottage, and bread sprinkled with carraway seeds is as ubiquitous as in Germany. Otherwise mutton and pork are generally procurable, beef less frequently, and skinny chickens if demanded. Rich cream sauces, smoked sausages and red pepper form ingredients of a large number of dishes. Eggs and butter are cheap, and boiled butter is used largely as hair oil.
The Slavs, who form a full half of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, are of another race altogether. Whether or no their ancestors were the original inhabitants of Eastern Europe is a disputed point, but certainly they have peopled vast tracts of it; the whole of Russia for instance, Bulgaria, Illyria, Poland, Silesia, Pomerania, Bohemia, and Croatia are all occupied by Slav peoples to-day. They are held to be a branch of the Aryan race, and are peaceful and agricultural in their habits, not warlike as the Magyars are. In the north part of the Empire they are usually fair, with blue eyes, and the children have a bleached appearance. Those who live up in the mountains exist chiefly on potatoes and cabbage or maize bread, and are often desperately poor. They are generally Catholics, Roman Catholicism being the dynastic religion of the Emperor. Numbers of the Slavs emigrate to America, in the hope of making enough money to return to their wild fastnesses in comfort.
Among the Slavonic races the Czechs are the most advanced, in spite of their difficult and unpronounceable language. They have behind them a national history, coherent and full of stirring incident. This tends to give them racial self-respect, and though they have succumbed to pressure and become an integral part of the Austrian Empire the spirit of nationality is gaining rather than losing in vitality.
The Roumanians are numerically the next in order in the Empire, and they are different again, having a touch of Latin blood, and being tall and dark-eyed and generally possessing very black hair. They tend sheep and work in the forests as their principal avocations. The Roumanians of the Empire live chiefly in Transylvania adjoining their own country, though separated from it by the Southern Carpathians.
Mr. Drage in Austria-Hungary says:
The Slavonic races occupy an unfavourable geographical position in Hungary, which, together with their internal feuds, weakens their influence. The Slovak, who lives chiefly in the north-west, is “poor, hard-working, honest and superstitious,” full of curious beliefs; but the epithet “stupid” cannot be applied to a race which, apart from Pan-Slavist writers like Kollar and Stur, produced the great Magyar poet of the revolution, Alexander Petöfi, and the great Magyar national hero, Louis Kossuth. The Ruthenian also is poor and backward; his holdings are minutely subdivided, and he lacks education. Croat and Serb are on a somewhat higher plane, and in spite of their intestinal quarrels they are by no means a factor to be neglected. The Wallachs or Roumans again, in spite of their numbers, are plunged into depths of ignorance and superstition, from which their Popes are unable to rescue them owing to their own ignorance and lack of moral influence over their flocks. The Magyar looks down upon the Wallach with an amused contempt, while the Saxons regard them very much as the Boers regard the Kaffirs.
While speaking of the races of the Dual Monarchy we must not forget two important, though scattered, divisions of the people to be found all over Austria and Hungary. These are the gipsies and the Jews.
The gipsies, in Hungarian “csigany” or “tsigane,” are an integral part of the nation, and the Hungarians would be hard put to it to know how to do without them, as they appear at all festivities of a social kind and play to the dancing or singing of the merry-makers. There is a gipsy quarter in every village, and its inhabitants are generally very poor, the children often running about without a strip of clothing on their little bodies. Both men and women are very dark, with gleaming white teeth and wild black hair. They are crafty, wheedling, and dishonest, and not averse from horse-stealing, but passionately fond of music. They are as a rule a fine upstanding race, and pride themselves on their small hands and feet; they can endure great fatigue and are practically weather-proof. Childishly light-hearted and vain, quick-tempered and with their hand against every man, to them the races who are not gipsies are dull and heavy-witted, stupid and slow, made to be taken advantage of. The gipsies develop quickly, and grow old, especially the women, before middle life, but the old gipsy crones seem even more able to wile the money from the pockets of the Gentiles than the younger members of the race, and their skill in fortune-telling is certainly remarkable. Their origin is disputed, but the common idea that they are somehow connected with Egypt is erroneous, though gipsies are found in Egypt as well as in almost every other country in the world, and they are there celebrated for their skill in snake-charming.
Like the Jews they are a race apart, and they preserve their own characteristics in a most extraordinary way considering that they live amidst alien peoples.
The women have a knack of wearing even rags in such a queenly style that they appear more like draperies than made-up clothes, and they have an almost royal carriage which seems to be natural to them. Living in the midst of dirt and squalor, sometimes by preference, yet when they come to the towns and villages to play the young men get themselves up in dandyish fashion, and their command of their instruments is marvellous. In most cases they play by ear and can pick up anything.